


All the Shades of Gray

by Fushigi Kismet (tokyofish)



Series: Other Side of Ordinary [5]
Category: Bleach
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 08:36:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2018304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokyofish/pseuds/Fushigi%20Kismet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tomorrow her brother is getting married. This night is an anomaly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Shades of Gray

**Author's Note:**

> Bleach is © Kubo Tite, Viz Media, Studio Pierrot, Shueisha, etc. This is a nonprofit fanwork.
> 
> Takes place in alternate storyline that branches off from canon post-Chapter 181.

The house is quiet, its occupants exhausted and deep asleep, unwilling to stir until morning, that long-awaited morning.

Yuzu sits and sews. She is in her father's office, tucked away in a corner of the clinic. The space is small and dark and walled off from the rest. Before Isshin installed cabinets in the main clinic he had used the space as a large storage closet. Now it sits unused, an empty filing cabinet by the door, an old hospital bed by the far wall, and Yuzu on a chair in the middle. Overhead the light bulb has gone out and no one can be bothered to find or buy a replacement. Other than the candle the only light filters in through a small, dusty window.

The rest of the clinic should be full of beds and patients and people sleeping. Instead it is full of decorations and plates of cold hors d'oeuvres and rented tuxedoes and hanging bridesmaid gowns. The beds and futons are littered around the house where it is warmer and does not smell of antiseptic and people sleep and snore and dream of tomorrow when all the madness will be over.

Orihime is sleeping in Yuzu's bed. Karin gave hers up to Tatsuki and sleeps soundly on a futon near the kitchen. Yuzu has a futon laid down somewhere in the midst of the mess she once called their living room, but unlike the rest of the people her house holds – and it holds so many at the moment she wonders that it does not burst – she cannot sleep.

Her brother and Rukia had been so touched and grateful when Orihime had enthusiastically volunteered to make the wedding dress and Ishida the tuxedo, but Yuzu had felt - unfairly, she knew - that everyone was stealing her brother from her, was taking this day away from her family, and so she had said, quite adamantly, that she would make the veil.

Now here it is, the night before the wedding day and Yuzu cannot sleep. She has left one too many things unfinished. The veil takes shape beneath her hands; it is half-made but already eerily beautiful; it glitters like gossamer snow. But the white silk roses sit and wait to be sewn in place, and even amateur eyes can tell it is like something unfulfilled and left undone, a mere promise of a promise.

So she bends her head over the cloth and sews and as though the white-silver thread is imbued with ancient magic the veil slowly becomes the shining raiment of a bride. Each careful stitch is filled with her sadness, her love, her hopes for their future. It is so full of everything and nothing, she wonders if she can finish it.

Ever-conscious though she is of her silent audience, she does not hurry as she attaches the first flower. He does not mind; of all the others, he alone shares her sleeplessness. So instead he sits on his borrowed bed and watches her sew by the guttering light of the candle, and of what he is thinking she dares not ask.

For her it is enough that he permits her to sit with him in silence. In his presence her fingers move steadily, weaving the needle in and out, but her heart trembles violently. With every stitch, she envisions his eyes on her and his detached expression and thinks, _I have loved you, all this time._

Her only answer is silence and the painful thud of her own heart.

It is enough, she forces herself to believe, that they are together, here and now. It is enough that she is near him while he is alone; that their solitary existences may inhabit the same lonely space. She cannot ask for anything from him, not acknowledgment, not words. For her it must be enough that he looks at her and she knows the color of his eyes.

She sews and does not look at him.

"Try it on," Renji says suddenly, out of the dark.

Her fingers pause midway through sewing on the last silk flower and she sits for a moment, still as a china doll, and listens to his voice echoing inside her.

The thin silver needle winks in the light as she pins it in a petal to keep the flower from falling. Lightly, she lifts the veil, turns it, the lace and silk and filmy gauze iridescent and translucent in the light, and puts it on. It is, she thinks, as the cloth brushes against the side of her face, like looking past a dream lingering at the corners of your eyes. 

"You're beautiful," Renji breathes, and looks away.

She takes off the veil slowly, and, standing up, sets it down on her vacated chair. Her gaze lingers on it a moment, then she turns to him and reaches her hands up to cup his face and turn it towards her.

His eyes narrow. Perhaps he is seeing her now for the first time. All this time he has never seen her . . . All this time she has never seen anything but him.

Before he can pull away she leans up and presses her mouth to his.

 _It's like a spell,_ Yuzu thinks. _I'm casting a spell._

His mouth responds with crushing force, his hands pull her against him. Turn my bones to powder, she wants to tell him, and scatter me in the sea.

They are full of eager, insatiable desperation, and she kisses him in her inexperienced fashion and lets him teach her through the play of his tongue in her mouth what it means to be kissed. She thinks she wants more than kissing, wants him, all of him, and brushes her hand against him where it matters. He wants her too.

Or if not her, he wants what she wants at this moment, and that is enough.

He pulls off his shirt and she her blouse; they come together again and his hands undo her bra, push down her skirt, part her thighs. She lets him kiss her there, there, and _there_ ; his hands, large, warm hands, rough from years of effort, move across her smooth skin.

She remembers to breathe only as she exhales while mouthing his name. His fingers stroke her back and forth and she inhales as she gasps. Breathes. Never has the simple intake and outtake of air been so exquisite.

He growls, a feral sound; it is all too slow for him. She parts her legs around him, slick and warm and willing, and he makes another noise, a wildcat's notion of a promise, and takes her invitation.

They are against the bed now, their combined weight causing the springs to creak and the frame to shake.

She pants because she cannot help it; her hips move beneath him and her legs tighten around him as he pushes forward, ever forward. He is laying claim to all the virgin land of her body and she welcomes him as a conqueror and despoiler. She yields to him and folds herself around him. He laps and nips at her breasts and she tangles her fingers in his long red hair and softly cries his name.

Then his mouth is crushing hers with bruising force again and she feels his body responding to her own and thinks, _The flames have caught you too,_ before she can no longer think, only respond, only elicit his response with fevered hands and tortured cries and the sweet agony he finds waiting between her thighs.

And with a rush she has ceased to be anything but pleasure incarnate for him as he takes her and drowns himself in her love. It is not her name he moans against her skin and it is not her face he sees. But she knew it would be like this from the start. She has always known.

She doesn't care.

Her love grew like a bramble inside her heart, impaling her with every heartbeat. She treasures every piercing thorn.

So she takes him, loves him, gives herself to him. It doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter, oh how it matters, even here, even now, even as they rock together, he so deep within her that she can no longer tell the difference between his body and hers, his blood singing or hers, his breath, her cry, it is all the same, it is his heartbeat, her heartbeat, together they cry out, together they come, and in that instant Yuzu knows, her heart breaking from the pressure of a thousand thorns, what she has always known and has never known . . .

 

He will never love her.

 

 

She moves off the bed, uncomfortably sore. His eyes are closed; she does not think he is sleeping.

There is a mirror on the far side of the room and a small sink. She examines herself in the glass by the dim light seeping through the window. The candle has long since gone out. Her fingers trace _there_ the marks of his mouth, _here_ the faint beginnings of a bruise. Grimly, she smiles and wonders if her brother's first time was tender and beautiful. Hers was terrible and savage and wonderful. She runs her hands down her body and relives the burning touch of her lover's skin to hers, the crushing weight of his body and his need. She does not wonder about Rukia's first time. She could not bear it.

Quietly, she turns the faucet on and watches the water run before pushing her hands into the stream. She scrubs her hands, then washes her face. When she looks up into the mirror her face is wet.

Reflected behind her in the mirror, he is propped up on his elbows, watching her.

Her hand twists the knob, the water cuts off abruptly, and she shakes her hands and dries them on a hanging cloth. Deliberately she walks over to her chair, picks up the veil, unpins the needle. With tiny, delicate stitches, she stands and sews as he watches her slim, naked body standing straight and tall.

As she sews the last stitch of the last flower, the needle pricks her finger and she watches a perfect blossom well up, glowing red against her skin. He pulls her hand towards him and places the finger in his mouth, touches his tongue to the blood. She wonders how it tastes, this blood that burned for him, that even now flows sweet and hot through her veins and burns for him still. Looking at him, the stubborn set of his shoulders, the guilt in the eyes that will not meet her own, she thinks as she did once, a lifetime ago, Abarai-san is so nice.

Gently she pulls her finger free, lets her fingers curl over his thumb, her nails shining with pink-hued seashell color in the faint light, and gazes at him steadily.

She sets the veil aside.

It is pure and white like snow. Tomorrow she will place it on Rukia's head and marvel at how beautiful she looks, how nervous, how content. Tomorrow she will watch as her brother and her new sister-in-law speak their vows, perfect contrasts in black and white.

Tonight she will climb back into Renji's arms and they will love each other again with the desperation of two people who know that this night is an anomaly, an aberration that will never come again. They know it now, just as they have always known it - It's no use. Both their loves will go unrequited.

Here we are, Yuzu thinks as he draws her to him, as their mouths meet and part and their bodies twine together, all the shades of gray.

**Author's Note:**

> Written back in 2009, but never published. So before that other "shades of grey," dammit.
> 
> Also, apologies to everyone who thought I was going the fluffy, happy route with this back in "Homework, Houseguests, and Happiness."


End file.
